


Let These Words Answer

by pellucid



Category: The Doctor Blake Mysteries
Genre: F/M, Jean and her feelings, post-episode 5x05
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-20
Updated: 2017-10-20
Packaged: 2019-01-20 06:01:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12426495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pellucid/pseuds/pellucid
Summary: She lets everything else drop away, and it’s only the two of them, alone in this quiet room, with their physical wounds that will heal. She holds his hand, the two of them together, scarred and healing.





	Let These Words Answer

**Author's Note:**

> So I had a LOT of Jean feelings after 5.05 (didn’t we all…). This is an attempt to work through some of them. Beta thanks to gabolange, who never fails to make me a better writer. Remaining mistakes, superfluous commas, and stubbornly-held errant sentence constructions are all my own.

The room is quiet. She watches Lucien’s chest rise and fall steadily, and she feels his pulse thrum under the warm skin of his wrist. She lets herself breathe again, matching her breath to his, lets her own heart start beating once more. Her mind is processing only single words. Alive. Here. Mine.

She always half expected this, deep in her subconscious. As long as she’s know him he has barreled around heedlessly, and she has worried and told herself not to, and tried not to remember what it feels like to be left behind. She feared the worst from the moment Charlie came in the door tonight, his face ashen. He called her Jean and took her arm like he thought she might stumble, then gripped the steering wheel, knuckles white, as he drove too fast to the hospital.

No one questions her presence there. The trauma doctor reported to her immediately, and the ward sister waived aside the rules about visiting hours. If all the gossip made them know she belongs here, she will manage to be grateful for it.

Lucien wakes, jokes about his injury, sleeps, wakes again. Their friends hover, though by now it is deep into the night. Charlie and Matthew try to take her home again, but they don’t actually expect her to come. 

She watches him sleep. Her burned wrist is throbbing, and she holds onto that pain. It is simple, contained. She lets everything else drop away, and it’s only the two of them, alone in this quiet room, with their physical wounds that will heal. She holds his hand, the two of them together, scarred and healing.

**

On the third day they let her bring him home. They were both getting restless in the hospital, and though she’s been grateful for the nursing staff’s help in keeping him contained, she’s also weary of the accompanying furtive glances and whispers. Charlie, Rose, Matthew, and Alice have loitered each day in the hospital corridor. Other friends—Bill and Ned, Cec, even Patrick Tyneman—have visited. Surely most of Ballarat knows by now that Lucien was attacked. No one from the church has come at all.

Charlie, Matthew, and Rose have been cooking, she discovers. Not just for themselves but to stock the freezer, to save her having to do it for a few days. She tries to be grateful, but for the most part it just reminds her who isn’t checking in or bringing food. 

The church has always been the backdrop to her life. Not always a comfort but certainly always a force of stable continuity. The ritual of the liturgy, the smell of incense and bread, the familiar creak and thump of the kneelers, the low din of restless children whispering over the mass. And ever-present, the community: visiting, baking, gossiping, helping. She knows, of course, that people she has known all her life are now uncomfortable around her. She has seen the looks during mass, has heard the conversations that go silent as she approaches, has understood the meaning behind even her closest friends’ excuses to avoid her. But she never quite expected this palpable, sudden absence. 

Sometimes you bend to the church, and sometimes you want it to bend to you, she said the other day. You want it to bend, but it doesn’t.

She moves into Lucien’s room after they come home from the hospital. It isn’t entirely deliberate. The first evening she sits with him, and when she starts nodding off in her chair he shifts in the bed, raising the covers on his uninjured side. She toes off her shoes and climbs in with her clothes on, burrowing into his warmth, careful to avoid his bandages. 

“Stay,” he whispers into her hair as he wraps her hand in his and holds it over his heart.

“All right,” she whispers back. 

The next evening she dresses for bed and goes to his room instead of her own. The day after, her dressing gown and slippers find a new home in his closet. They’re not exactly advertising this to Charlie and Matthew, but neither does she feel like she wants to hide it. 

Lucien has been pushing his limits all day, before turning petulant in his exhaustion. He has made a mess in the kitchen, nearly pulled his stitches out, and twice she had to pour out the whiskey he knows he shouldn’t drink. She’s exhausted, annoyed with him, and so very tired of holding everything together behind the bravest face she can muster. 

The events of the past week play back in her head. The untenable options for the divorce. Rose’s pregnancy fears and then palpable relief. Lucien in the hospital bed. Father Emery telling her to make a choice. Every time she thinks she is approaching her breaking point, she finds a new reserve to take on the next challenge, but it can’t last much longer. 

When Lucien starts banging on the piano while Matthew is trying to watch the television, she puts him to bed. It’s early yet, but she convinces him with the promise of joining him. He settles to his book, and she curls into his side, pretending to read her own. All of the frustrated energy that has been coming off him all day is gone; instead, she is the restless one. Lucien can tell how bothered she is, she realizes, now that they’re here together, quiet.

“Do you want to talk about it?” he asks, finally. He is still, waiting for her.

She does and she doesn’t want to talk about it. They’ve promised each other honesty, and he deserves hers. She also has no idea how to explain what she is feeling, the layers and the contradictions. She closes her book and his, takes his hand and traces the veins. His other arm holds her close, and she thinks about how long and how much she has wanted him.

“I was pregnant when I got married,” she says, not entirely sure why this, of all the things weighing on her, is what comes out first. She feels his slow intake of breath, imagines him thinking, calculating dates between her marriage and young Christopher’s birth. “We lost the baby,” she explains before he can ask. “We were nineteen, pushed into the whole thing before we were ready, and then there wasn’t even a baby after all.” 

She imagines what he might say if he were a different man. Why did you never tell me? Why did you sleep with Christopher before you married him but you won’t sleep with me? How can I fix this?

“Jean,” he says. Just her name. No questions and no pity, and she loves him for it.

“I’ve been thinking about all of that lately.” She won’t betray Rose’s secret to explain why, but she suspects this all would have come back to the surface regardless. “We moved on from it, of course. The boys came along quickly, and we grew into the promises we’d made to each other. The happy times mostly outweighed the unhappy ones, especially in those years before the war. But sometimes I still felt so guilty.”

When she was still a girl, God took her daughter from her. Of course, she didn’t really believe it was a punishment, not in the sober light of day. Her God is loving, not vindictive. Yet the guilt weighed upon her, and the years added more. Christopher’s death. Her failures with Jack. Her different failures with Christopher, Jr. For a long time, she spent her sleepless nights fearing that she would have been a better wife and a better mother if only she had started out with more care. When she was still a girl, she was reckless, and in various ways they all suffered for it.

Lucien kisses her hairline and pulls her tighter to him. This time, she thinks, she is not being reckless. She’s walking straight into this sin, knowing and committed. She brings his hand to her lips, kisses his fingers. The fear has been there for days, a bitter taste at the back of her mouth that she keeps trying to push back. She almost lost him, and that, too, could be a punishment. 

“You know it wasn’t your fault, Jean,” he says. 

“Mmm,” she responds, searching for the words. “Of course it wasn’t my fault. My baby girl. Christopher’s death. Even this.” She gestures with their joined hands to his injury. “But we still look for meaning when things happen. And the church is very good at cause and effect. ‘The wages of sin is death’ and all that.”

“But surely it isn’t the only option for understanding the world?” he suggests. His lips against her temple quirk into a smile. “Cause: you are brilliant and beautiful and the most extraordinary woman in the world. Effect: I am therefore madly in love with you and awestruck every day that this is real.” 

She laughs then, a little, and cranes her neck around to kiss his jaw, then his mouth. “It is real,” she marvels.

Cause: she will marry Lucien Blake, and she also can’t see her resolve not to sleep with him until they are married outlasting this endless purgatory of an engagement. Effect: she will be—she is—happier than she has been for so many, many years. Also effect: she will live for the rest of her life, unrepentant, in a state of sin. Both prospects make her feel what she can scarcely put into words. It is breathtaking, agonizing, freeing, glorious, terrifying.

Lucien walked away from the church when he was a boy; of all the things that haunt him, this, at least, does not. She thinks of Eve Neville, defiant even in the face of death. Of Audrey Young, trading a church that no longer suited her for another that did, as though God changes with the season, like a dress or a hat. She doesn’t know if they’re brave or foolhardy. Did their decisions also feel like this?

Real: the warmth of this man by her side, the beat of his heart, the taste of his lips. Also real: the body of Christ dissolving on her tongue, the echo of her prayers, the comfort of the sacraments.

“’Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh,’” she quotes, mostly to herself.

“Hmm?” Lucien asks. His voice is drowsy.

“Cleave,” she repeats. “To cling together, but also to break apart. I always thought it was such an odd word.”

“I love you,” he says, as though it’s an answer to some question she doesn’t know how to ask. Maybe it is.

She has made her choice; she knows that. He holds her, and she is split apart and made whole.


End file.
